Green Day Fic: she couldn't scream while i held her close
Title: she couldn't scream while i held her close
Author: rainjewel
Rating: NC17
Fandom, Pairing: Green Day; Mike/Ana
Disclaimer: I. Am. Making. This. Shit. Up.
Summary: THE HET FIC. Yeah, whatever. I'm totally fucking around with whatever history that exists with Mike and Ana. Set pre-Dookie, at least. Take it as Mary Sue-esque crack but better. This fic has been floating in my brain forever, but I only get about one hour a WEEK to write it, so forgive me.
Prologue
Ana doesn’t really remember him the first time they meet, though she insists, later on, that she does. See, the thing is she was pulling a double that day and stuck in the store from 11:00 a.m. all the way until fucking 10 p.m. and Sean (one of the Lifers, you just knew it) was being a dick and stuck her on drive-thru. All day. She remembers it was a little after four, the only reason she remembers that is because it was about the time she was due for a break and because of him and more importantly, because of Sean she got stuck taking his order and never got the break. Sean was supposed to be watching the lobby, but right when Mike Dirnt walked through the glass doors he decided it was time for him to go “check” something in the back. She hadn’t even had time to give him a dirty look before turning on her patented “How May I Help You?” smile.
“Welcome to Burger King, what can I get for you today?” she had asked, propping one foot up against the bottom of the front counter. Her feet had been sore.
He had looked a little surly. Too skinny for her liking, really. Ana’s mother had never been shy about chiding her only daughter about her weight, because instead of curves she had only seen a “chubby” girl, so Ana didn’t really care for guys whose waists were possibly thinner than hers. Also, he smelled like cigarettes and looked like he hadn’t washed in a few days, and there was a weird thing with his eyebrows. It was like he didn’t have any. These are mostly parts Ana added in later to her memory, things she noticed the third or fourth time he came in, and added it to her made-up “first” memory of him. Her best friend, Sasha, had dated some guy from Oregon who didn’t have any eyebrows, and according to her men without eyebrows couldn’t be trusted.
This part is true: he had ordered a Whopper and fries (so original) and when she had asked if he wanted to “Biggie Size” it, he had said it was “Biggie Sized” enough for her. She remembered this later on, the second time they met, because she remembered feeling downright homicidal that this skinny fucker had the audacity to order a fuckin’ Whopper and then call her fat. She also remembered, on that second meeting, that right afterwards he had told her “Anastasia” was a really pretty name. He might have asked for her phone number, but that part gets a little blurry in her memory because Sean chose that minute to light the grill on fire and she spent the next ten minutes mopping up fluid from the fire extinguisher and cursing the very invention of “fast food.”
--<--@ x @-->--
Part One
Thursday night, and Ana has the day off tomorrow. Ana looks forward to her days off because usually her roommate, Nikki, is out with her boyfriend Thom, which means Ana gets Fridays to herself. She uses the time to study while she does the laundry, stopping every once in awhile to clean the bathroom or do the dishes. She’s studying to be a realtor. Her Aunt Celia is in the business and has a nicer house than Ana’s mom ever did, not too mention a better car, and Ana knows for a fact that Aunt Celia is dumber than paint so real estate can’t be that difficult.
So on Thursdays Ana works extra hard to get out of the store early. She volunteers for the hard jobs, like cleaning the grill, mopping the lobby, all the ones that are time-consuming because she knows she can do them the fastest and if Sean isn’t being too much of a prick, she can maybe fudge a little. She’d never go so far as to make the Health Dept. see red, but it’s not like every little crumb has to be gone from in between the tiles every night. That and Sean = prick even when he’s not being that much of a prick, so the justification process is easy.
It’s in November, starting to get chilly in Oakland, and Ana volunteers to take the garbage out and compact it because a storm is coming and there is nothing more annoying than compacting trash in a downpour. However, as Ana hefts the last bag of fries and ketchup and baby spit and god only knows what else into the compactor, she’s starting to regret this benevolence. One of the garbage bags from the fryer ripped and she’s covered in salt and built up grease, right down her front. She sighs. She turns the key and leans against the peeling paint of the compactor as it whirrs and starts smashing today’s bags into tiny little pancakes. It’s sort of cathartic, honestly, as if every fry box that gets smashed makes up for all the stress the day has been.
She doesn’t even notice anyone’s there until he speaks up.
“So, uh-” he says, and Ana screams and throws a milk crate at him. She misses, of course, because it’s dark and in the corral there are tons of different shapes that are hard to make out. Sean insists that most of the girls take a flashlight out with them, just in case there are any rapists hiding in the parking lot, but Ana doesn’t like to use it because she can’t carry as much garbage and the more trips she makes the longer she’s stuck at work. She has it with her now though, stuck in the back pocket of her Calvins, and she whips it out and shines it on him. She’s not sure if she should blind him or hit him with it, but before she can do much of anything his arms are up and he’s begging her to not scream again, Jesus Christ.
“I’m gonna scream if you don’t get out of here,” she tells him. “You’re not supposed to be in here, this is Employees Only, like on the sign.” She thinks about the fifty dollar bonus that comes with being Employee of the Month, and tacks on another word, “Sir.”
“Oh, well, I’m sorry,” he says, and she can see him now. She recognizes him, but in a vague sort of way. He’s wearing the same jacket and earrings but it’s not like she knew his name, and people are hard to remember for her if they don’t have names. He crouches, picking up the milk crate she threw at him. “Um, here. I didn’t see the sign, it’s kind of dark out here.” He looks away, as if it doesn’t matter that he’s just terrified her and isn’t supposed to be in this part of the store anyway. “What is this place?”
Ana’s hand is moving before she knows it, taking the milk crate from him with a forced politeness. “This is the corral. Not really a corral, you know, like with horses. It’s where we keep the trash compactor, used bun racks, milk crates. There’s cupboards over there that are locked, they have gloves and extra extension cords. Basically it’s a super-duper junk drawer.” She realizes, belatedly, that she is babbling, and that she’s doing so because she’s uncomfortable and that’s because he has made her uncomfortable, and she really just wishes he would leave. “Look, you really shouldn’t be back here…Sir.”
“That’s neat,” is what he says, murmuring, and Ana almost believes he really does find that neat. He turns back to look at her, smiling, raising up on his tiptoes to avoid the glare of her flashlight. Ana, to her credit, lowers the light a little. “So, I came in here the other day, you probably don’t remember me, but-well you might, I ordered a Whopper.” He sounds almost proud, searching her eyes with a hopeful look that says he really wishes she does remember him. She does, in a very ephemeral way, and cocks her head to the side with a helpless shrug. He continues. “Well, man, I just came back ‘cause I thought that was cool how you handled the fire and everything. I mean, you mopped really quickly. I’ve never seen anyone mop that fast.”
All Ana can do is blink, and remember to switch the key on the trash compactor off before the thing eats itself. The silence that rings in the air as it settles makes her voice seem louder than it is, so she tries to whisper. “You-you came to tell me I mop fast?”
“Uh-huh.” He nods, like it’s completely sane to come up to a total stranger in a forbidden area and compliment them on their mopping skills. He holds out a hand. “I’m Mike.”
Ana isn’t sure that shaking his hand is a good idea. It’s not the best way to stay away from a potential axe murderer and he’s kind of cute, in a too-skinny, pear-shaped way and she knows that there’s Burger King lard covering her from her visor all the way down to her Keds. So instead she takes a step back, turning the flashlight on the ground.
“Nice to meet you,” she says. “Look, I gotta go back inside or my manager is going to have a kitten. You shouldn’t be in here.” It seems important to keep reminding him of that fact.
“Yeah,” he says, and if she didn’t know any better, she would think he sounded disappointed. She sees a flash of teeth and assumes it’s a smile, still pressed somewhat up against the garbage compactor. “Guess I’ll see you around, Ana.”
“Yeah.” She watches him turn away, a sense of relief flooding through her as he disappears out through the corral doors. She feels dizzy, overheated although it’s kind of cold tonight, so she sits down on the nearest milk crate and turns off the flashlight. When Sean comes out five minutes to ask her what the heck she’s doing, she tells him she doesn’t feel so well and he lets her go home without finishing her sidework. It’s probably the nicest thing Sean has ever done for anyone, but Ana doesn’t like him any more for it.
--<--@ x @-->--
Henry was Ana’s first boyfriend. She kissed Travis Elmore in fifth grade, but that doesn’t really count, and neither did Kyle, who was basically her date for the prom followed by three weeks of awkwardness in which she spent every waking moment fearing he would kiss her. Kyle was a dry kisser, rough and unpleasant.
Henry worked at the local bookstore, a place called Kant’s that made most of the teenager’s laugh and the existential yuppies smile, knowingly. It was the summer after she had graduated high school, which was the first time Ana remembers having too much time on her hands. Her parents couldn’t afford college, even with the financial aid, and Ana wasn’t sure if she wanted to go to school or not, so she was going to take a year to get some money saved up and hopefully start going to community college if everything worked out right.
Henry found her inbetween the Christian Self-Help section and a stack of cookbooks someone had chucked in a corner and promptly forgotten about. Ana was trying to learn how to cook so her mother would get off her back about eating fast food all the time and had so far mastered ham sandwiches and ramen.
What Ana remembers most about Henry is that she was disappointed she went all the way before learning how to give proper head. It was mortifying. She’d always been too much of a prude for her own good and had never imagined giving head and the term “blowjob” always reminded her of lollipops and eight grade jokes. Henry laid her down on her back and had the condom on and his head between her breasts before she could really think about which order things were supposed to go.
He said things like, “Mmmm, god, you’re so hot. God, you’re so beautiful,” and “Ana, god, yes, that’s it,” which was boring as fuck. In the time it took him to come she had made a list of things to buy at the grocer’s, as well as a full rundown of the cast of Full House. He touched her like glass the first few times they fucked. He held her after the first time, because it was her first, and after he left she found herself spread open, naked on the bed and praying her roommate wasn’t coming home early that night and fucked herself as hard as she could on her fingers. She imagined Henry holding her down and biting her throat and ordering her to scream and tell her how much she liked it. She remembers coming with a wail and lying there, sweaty and spent, reminding herself to wash her sheets.
It wasn’t anything like she imagined. When the sheets came out of the dryer, smelling like they always did, she cried for hours over how meaningless life truly was. The slept together a few more times after that, then broke up. She wasn’t upset in the slightest, and even though it meant she had to stop shopping at Kant’s, that was alright too-they hadn’t had any good cookbooks anyway.
--<--@ x @-->--
The Second and Third time Ana meets Mike Dirnt, she ignores him completely. He comes in two days in a row, orders the same thing, and then spends an hour and a half making his coffee last as he tries to catch her eye.
She doesn’t ignore him on purpose-it’s a busy time of year and she can’t always drop everything to chat up customers, but she also think it’s pretty goddamn weird for a boy to be stalking her. She thinks he’s probably a stoner, and he likes that she smells like fried food and is hoping to score a few free meals. She tells herself that up until the Fourth time she meets him.
It’s Friday night, her weekend ruined by another late night shift thanks to Sean and the teeming masses of fellow employees who work for a few days and then disappear. By the time 11:00 p.m. rolls around her feet hurt and her left ear is bright pink from the drive-thru headset. She wrangles Sean into letting her change in the bathroom. It’s Friday night and there are a million lucky people who are out tonight, going to the bars and getting laid, and Ana is not going to be caught dead in a Burger King uniform as she walks home. After all, she does have some pride and just enough hope that maybe, someday, she’ll meet a really cute trust-fund boy with a car who will suddenly, desperately need her.
“Wow,” is what Mike Dirnt says when she walks out the door, nearly making her trip over her own feet in surprise. “You look pretty.” He has a car, and a cigarette instead of a trust fund. He pays in change, so Ana knows he’s not rich. Sean is already halfway across the parking lot and apparently unperturbed by Mike’s presence. Ana raises her visor threateningly, black curls going every which way after being confined for eight hours. “We’re closed,” she says.
“I’d say so,” comes the reply, lazy from Mike’s mouth. Yellow smoke follows it, Ana’s eyes follow the smoke, watching it curl up from his mouth, thread through his fingers and into the night air. Under the streetlamp the hollows of his cheeks are blackened, his face reminiscent of a fox with all the angles on display. She clucks her tongue.
“You’re not giving me a ride home,” she says, tucking her visor into her satchel. Mike’s car is actually a pickup, red and dull, something that is not going to attract the right kind of attention on a Friday night.
Mike’s face screws up in a grimace. “Hey, c’mon now. Don’t be like that. I’ve been waiting out here for like, an hour and a half.” He chucks the cigarette, shoving his hands in the pockets of his tight jeans like an unhappy four-year-old. “I mean, I’m not dangerous. You know me, right?”
Ana shakes her head at that, moving away from him, ignoring how he follows. She bends over, picking up his cigarette butt, going to throw it away in the garbage can. “I don’t like people who litter,” she says smartly, although it’s really the fact that Sean will kill her come morning if he thinks her doper friend was leaving a bunch of half-smoked butts on the parking lot.
Mike looks around. “Dude, it’s Oakland,” he says, as if that explains everything. She clucks her tongue again, running a hand through her hair. Her feet still hurt, the discomfort only increased by the mary janes she changed into to walk home, so she shifts her weight from side to side, wondering exactly why she hasn’t started walking away yet.
Mike purses his lips, bobbing his head, raising one eyebrow as he looks at her. The next words come out clumsy. “So…you gotta boyfriend that’s gonna come pick you up?”
“Oh my god,” Ana says, jumping as if electricity shot up through the cement, shaking her head at herself. She turns on her heel and walks away from him, thinking about bad pick up lines and how nice it would be to have a boyfriend that would come pick her up after work.
--<--@ x @-->--
“You know,” Mike says a few nights later, “I don’t understand why you just don’t let me drive.” He’s walking her home. They have agreed on this. He can walk her home, as long as he stays two feet in front of her where she can see him at all times. She’s thinking on her Econ homework and how much Wednesday’s test is going to blow.
At least Mike’s backside is something that’s not too hard on the eyes. His shoulders are narrow but his ass looks good in the jeans he wears. It’s the third time he’s stayed until close, and the third night he’s left his truck at the store and followed (or rather, led) her home. He talks, she doesn’t, and somewhere between her wandering thoughts on mortgages and the way the denim hugs the curve of his butt, Ana fails to notice when Mike Dirnt stops walking and waits for her to plow right into his shoulder blade.
“Oh shit,” she says, eyes watering as her nose crashes into his back. She puts a hand up to cover her face, sniffling loudly as her face throbs. The crash knocks him forward, sending him a few stumbling steps away from her.
“Jesus, woman,” he says, turning around after he regains footing. “No need to-hey, you okay?” He reaches out and takes her wrist. It’s the first time he’s touched her and his fingers are callused, cold. She thinks wildly about how her momma always said her features were too strong and to not bring so much attention to her nose, and now she’s gone and slammed it, nostrils first, into this skinny boy’s shoulder.
“Yeah, yeah, I…sorry, I didn’t mean to run into you,” she says, mortified as she watches Mike’s blue eyes stare openly at her runny eyes and red nose. She looks at how his hand holds her wrist, delicate and yet capable at the same time.
Mike shrugs, smiles, and drops her hand. “It’s okay. I’ve had worse.” He falls into step beside her, still looking at her profile. Ana takes this as a cue to start moving, blinking through the last of tears. “You sure you’re okay?”
Ana feels like rolling her eyes, but the thought that he’s about to laugh at her makes her both angry and frightened. Instead she just nods, curtly, licking a stray tear away from the corner of her mouth. Mike seems to take the hint and just walks along side her, and Ana doesn’t mention the rule because she is the one that just ran into him with her face. He doesn’t laugh though, he doesn’t say anything, and after awhile the waiting is just too much. “Fine, just…say it,” she says, voice coming out in a tightly controlled rage. “That was pretty stupid, just say it.”
Mike’s blue eyes go wide, his non-eyebrows lifting up into his messy hair. He laughs, which infuriates her to no end. “Well, I guess if you want to look at it that way,” he says. He giggles when he laughs, which is unfortunate, Ana thinks. Boys shouldn’t giggle. It makes her feel a little better.
“I said you could laugh, not be a jerk,” she mumbles, but it’s only half-hearted. She dares to look over at him, and he’s still smiling. It’s not a grin of amusement though, more of warmth.
“You think I’m in a jerk?” he says, still not laughing, just smiling that infuriating smile. She kind of likes it, somewhere in her belly.
“No,” she answers after a moment, lightly, looking away from him. Jerks don’t walk girls home. Creeps do though, and she tries to keep that in mind.
Mike smiles, then lights a cigarette. Ana hates cigarettes, but it looks good inbetween his fingers, like smokes do in the hands of movie stars. “That’s not good for you,” she says. “You should know better.”
“So I’m not a jerk, I’m just stupid?” he asks, looking over at her like a confused child, as if genuinely hurt by her comment. It ruins the cigarette mystique, and she regrets her comment.
“No,” she murmurs again. Mike reaches out, takes her hand. She lets him.
“You’re wrong you know,” he says. “Or you really think I’m a stupid punk stoner. I’m in a band, y’know? It’s pretty frickin’ rad.” He sounds proud.
She rolls her eyes. “Dude, don’t be proud of being a stupid stoner. That’s like, being a proud college drop out.” His hand is sweaty against hers, sort of grimy and sick. She wants to let go, but doesn’t.
“Hey,” he says, giving her an affronted look, smoke billowing out of his nose like an angry bull, “I graduated high school.”
She squeezes his hand, watching her apartment come into sight. He squeezes back, then slides his fingers up her wrist. She shivers. “You’d better go.
Author: rainjewel
Rating: NC17
Fandom, Pairing: Green Day; Mike/Ana
Disclaimer: I. Am. Making. This. Shit. Up.
Summary: THE HET FIC. Yeah, whatever. I'm totally fucking around with whatever history that exists with Mike and Ana. Set pre-Dookie, at least. Take it as Mary Sue-esque crack but better. This fic has been floating in my brain forever, but I only get about one hour a WEEK to write it, so forgive me.
Prologue
Ana doesn’t really remember him the first time they meet, though she insists, later on, that she does. See, the thing is she was pulling a double that day and stuck in the store from 11:00 a.m. all the way until fucking 10 p.m. and Sean (one of the Lifers, you just knew it) was being a dick and stuck her on drive-thru. All day. She remembers it was a little after four, the only reason she remembers that is because it was about the time she was due for a break and because of him and more importantly, because of Sean she got stuck taking his order and never got the break. Sean was supposed to be watching the lobby, but right when Mike Dirnt walked through the glass doors he decided it was time for him to go “check” something in the back. She hadn’t even had time to give him a dirty look before turning on her patented “How May I Help You?” smile.
“Welcome to Burger King, what can I get for you today?” she had asked, propping one foot up against the bottom of the front counter. Her feet had been sore.
He had looked a little surly. Too skinny for her liking, really. Ana’s mother had never been shy about chiding her only daughter about her weight, because instead of curves she had only seen a “chubby” girl, so Ana didn’t really care for guys whose waists were possibly thinner than hers. Also, he smelled like cigarettes and looked like he hadn’t washed in a few days, and there was a weird thing with his eyebrows. It was like he didn’t have any. These are mostly parts Ana added in later to her memory, things she noticed the third or fourth time he came in, and added it to her made-up “first” memory of him. Her best friend, Sasha, had dated some guy from Oregon who didn’t have any eyebrows, and according to her men without eyebrows couldn’t be trusted.
This part is true: he had ordered a Whopper and fries (so original) and when she had asked if he wanted to “Biggie Size” it, he had said it was “Biggie Sized” enough for her. She remembered this later on, the second time they met, because she remembered feeling downright homicidal that this skinny fucker had the audacity to order a fuckin’ Whopper and then call her fat. She also remembered, on that second meeting, that right afterwards he had told her “Anastasia” was a really pretty name. He might have asked for her phone number, but that part gets a little blurry in her memory because Sean chose that minute to light the grill on fire and she spent the next ten minutes mopping up fluid from the fire extinguisher and cursing the very invention of “fast food.”
--<--@ x @-->--
Part One
Thursday night, and Ana has the day off tomorrow. Ana looks forward to her days off because usually her roommate, Nikki, is out with her boyfriend Thom, which means Ana gets Fridays to herself. She uses the time to study while she does the laundry, stopping every once in awhile to clean the bathroom or do the dishes. She’s studying to be a realtor. Her Aunt Celia is in the business and has a nicer house than Ana’s mom ever did, not too mention a better car, and Ana knows for a fact that Aunt Celia is dumber than paint so real estate can’t be that difficult.
So on Thursdays Ana works extra hard to get out of the store early. She volunteers for the hard jobs, like cleaning the grill, mopping the lobby, all the ones that are time-consuming because she knows she can do them the fastest and if Sean isn’t being too much of a prick, she can maybe fudge a little. She’d never go so far as to make the Health Dept. see red, but it’s not like every little crumb has to be gone from in between the tiles every night. That and Sean = prick even when he’s not being that much of a prick, so the justification process is easy.
It’s in November, starting to get chilly in Oakland, and Ana volunteers to take the garbage out and compact it because a storm is coming and there is nothing more annoying than compacting trash in a downpour. However, as Ana hefts the last bag of fries and ketchup and baby spit and god only knows what else into the compactor, she’s starting to regret this benevolence. One of the garbage bags from the fryer ripped and she’s covered in salt and built up grease, right down her front. She sighs. She turns the key and leans against the peeling paint of the compactor as it whirrs and starts smashing today’s bags into tiny little pancakes. It’s sort of cathartic, honestly, as if every fry box that gets smashed makes up for all the stress the day has been.
She doesn’t even notice anyone’s there until he speaks up.
“So, uh-” he says, and Ana screams and throws a milk crate at him. She misses, of course, because it’s dark and in the corral there are tons of different shapes that are hard to make out. Sean insists that most of the girls take a flashlight out with them, just in case there are any rapists hiding in the parking lot, but Ana doesn’t like to use it because she can’t carry as much garbage and the more trips she makes the longer she’s stuck at work. She has it with her now though, stuck in the back pocket of her Calvins, and she whips it out and shines it on him. She’s not sure if she should blind him or hit him with it, but before she can do much of anything his arms are up and he’s begging her to not scream again, Jesus Christ.
“I’m gonna scream if you don’t get out of here,” she tells him. “You’re not supposed to be in here, this is Employees Only, like on the sign.” She thinks about the fifty dollar bonus that comes with being Employee of the Month, and tacks on another word, “Sir.”
“Oh, well, I’m sorry,” he says, and she can see him now. She recognizes him, but in a vague sort of way. He’s wearing the same jacket and earrings but it’s not like she knew his name, and people are hard to remember for her if they don’t have names. He crouches, picking up the milk crate she threw at him. “Um, here. I didn’t see the sign, it’s kind of dark out here.” He looks away, as if it doesn’t matter that he’s just terrified her and isn’t supposed to be in this part of the store anyway. “What is this place?”
Ana’s hand is moving before she knows it, taking the milk crate from him with a forced politeness. “This is the corral. Not really a corral, you know, like with horses. It’s where we keep the trash compactor, used bun racks, milk crates. There’s cupboards over there that are locked, they have gloves and extra extension cords. Basically it’s a super-duper junk drawer.” She realizes, belatedly, that she is babbling, and that she’s doing so because she’s uncomfortable and that’s because he has made her uncomfortable, and she really just wishes he would leave. “Look, you really shouldn’t be back here…Sir.”
“That’s neat,” is what he says, murmuring, and Ana almost believes he really does find that neat. He turns back to look at her, smiling, raising up on his tiptoes to avoid the glare of her flashlight. Ana, to her credit, lowers the light a little. “So, I came in here the other day, you probably don’t remember me, but-well you might, I ordered a Whopper.” He sounds almost proud, searching her eyes with a hopeful look that says he really wishes she does remember him. She does, in a very ephemeral way, and cocks her head to the side with a helpless shrug. He continues. “Well, man, I just came back ‘cause I thought that was cool how you handled the fire and everything. I mean, you mopped really quickly. I’ve never seen anyone mop that fast.”
All Ana can do is blink, and remember to switch the key on the trash compactor off before the thing eats itself. The silence that rings in the air as it settles makes her voice seem louder than it is, so she tries to whisper. “You-you came to tell me I mop fast?”
“Uh-huh.” He nods, like it’s completely sane to come up to a total stranger in a forbidden area and compliment them on their mopping skills. He holds out a hand. “I’m Mike.”
Ana isn’t sure that shaking his hand is a good idea. It’s not the best way to stay away from a potential axe murderer and he’s kind of cute, in a too-skinny, pear-shaped way and she knows that there’s Burger King lard covering her from her visor all the way down to her Keds. So instead she takes a step back, turning the flashlight on the ground.
“Nice to meet you,” she says. “Look, I gotta go back inside or my manager is going to have a kitten. You shouldn’t be in here.” It seems important to keep reminding him of that fact.
“Yeah,” he says, and if she didn’t know any better, she would think he sounded disappointed. She sees a flash of teeth and assumes it’s a smile, still pressed somewhat up against the garbage compactor. “Guess I’ll see you around, Ana.”
“Yeah.” She watches him turn away, a sense of relief flooding through her as he disappears out through the corral doors. She feels dizzy, overheated although it’s kind of cold tonight, so she sits down on the nearest milk crate and turns off the flashlight. When Sean comes out five minutes to ask her what the heck she’s doing, she tells him she doesn’t feel so well and he lets her go home without finishing her sidework. It’s probably the nicest thing Sean has ever done for anyone, but Ana doesn’t like him any more for it.
--<--@ x @-->--
Henry was Ana’s first boyfriend. She kissed Travis Elmore in fifth grade, but that doesn’t really count, and neither did Kyle, who was basically her date for the prom followed by three weeks of awkwardness in which she spent every waking moment fearing he would kiss her. Kyle was a dry kisser, rough and unpleasant.
Henry worked at the local bookstore, a place called Kant’s that made most of the teenager’s laugh and the existential yuppies smile, knowingly. It was the summer after she had graduated high school, which was the first time Ana remembers having too much time on her hands. Her parents couldn’t afford college, even with the financial aid, and Ana wasn’t sure if she wanted to go to school or not, so she was going to take a year to get some money saved up and hopefully start going to community college if everything worked out right.
Henry found her inbetween the Christian Self-Help section and a stack of cookbooks someone had chucked in a corner and promptly forgotten about. Ana was trying to learn how to cook so her mother would get off her back about eating fast food all the time and had so far mastered ham sandwiches and ramen.
What Ana remembers most about Henry is that she was disappointed she went all the way before learning how to give proper head. It was mortifying. She’d always been too much of a prude for her own good and had never imagined giving head and the term “blowjob” always reminded her of lollipops and eight grade jokes. Henry laid her down on her back and had the condom on and his head between her breasts before she could really think about which order things were supposed to go.
He said things like, “Mmmm, god, you’re so hot. God, you’re so beautiful,” and “Ana, god, yes, that’s it,” which was boring as fuck. In the time it took him to come she had made a list of things to buy at the grocer’s, as well as a full rundown of the cast of Full House. He touched her like glass the first few times they fucked. He held her after the first time, because it was her first, and after he left she found herself spread open, naked on the bed and praying her roommate wasn’t coming home early that night and fucked herself as hard as she could on her fingers. She imagined Henry holding her down and biting her throat and ordering her to scream and tell her how much she liked it. She remembers coming with a wail and lying there, sweaty and spent, reminding herself to wash her sheets.
It wasn’t anything like she imagined. When the sheets came out of the dryer, smelling like they always did, she cried for hours over how meaningless life truly was. The slept together a few more times after that, then broke up. She wasn’t upset in the slightest, and even though it meant she had to stop shopping at Kant’s, that was alright too-they hadn’t had any good cookbooks anyway.
--<--@ x @-->--
The Second and Third time Ana meets Mike Dirnt, she ignores him completely. He comes in two days in a row, orders the same thing, and then spends an hour and a half making his coffee last as he tries to catch her eye.
She doesn’t ignore him on purpose-it’s a busy time of year and she can’t always drop everything to chat up customers, but she also think it’s pretty goddamn weird for a boy to be stalking her. She thinks he’s probably a stoner, and he likes that she smells like fried food and is hoping to score a few free meals. She tells herself that up until the Fourth time she meets him.
It’s Friday night, her weekend ruined by another late night shift thanks to Sean and the teeming masses of fellow employees who work for a few days and then disappear. By the time 11:00 p.m. rolls around her feet hurt and her left ear is bright pink from the drive-thru headset. She wrangles Sean into letting her change in the bathroom. It’s Friday night and there are a million lucky people who are out tonight, going to the bars and getting laid, and Ana is not going to be caught dead in a Burger King uniform as she walks home. After all, she does have some pride and just enough hope that maybe, someday, she’ll meet a really cute trust-fund boy with a car who will suddenly, desperately need her.
“Wow,” is what Mike Dirnt says when she walks out the door, nearly making her trip over her own feet in surprise. “You look pretty.” He has a car, and a cigarette instead of a trust fund. He pays in change, so Ana knows he’s not rich. Sean is already halfway across the parking lot and apparently unperturbed by Mike’s presence. Ana raises her visor threateningly, black curls going every which way after being confined for eight hours. “We’re closed,” she says.
“I’d say so,” comes the reply, lazy from Mike’s mouth. Yellow smoke follows it, Ana’s eyes follow the smoke, watching it curl up from his mouth, thread through his fingers and into the night air. Under the streetlamp the hollows of his cheeks are blackened, his face reminiscent of a fox with all the angles on display. She clucks her tongue.
“You’re not giving me a ride home,” she says, tucking her visor into her satchel. Mike’s car is actually a pickup, red and dull, something that is not going to attract the right kind of attention on a Friday night.
Mike’s face screws up in a grimace. “Hey, c’mon now. Don’t be like that. I’ve been waiting out here for like, an hour and a half.” He chucks the cigarette, shoving his hands in the pockets of his tight jeans like an unhappy four-year-old. “I mean, I’m not dangerous. You know me, right?”
Ana shakes her head at that, moving away from him, ignoring how he follows. She bends over, picking up his cigarette butt, going to throw it away in the garbage can. “I don’t like people who litter,” she says smartly, although it’s really the fact that Sean will kill her come morning if he thinks her doper friend was leaving a bunch of half-smoked butts on the parking lot.
Mike looks around. “Dude, it’s Oakland,” he says, as if that explains everything. She clucks her tongue again, running a hand through her hair. Her feet still hurt, the discomfort only increased by the mary janes she changed into to walk home, so she shifts her weight from side to side, wondering exactly why she hasn’t started walking away yet.
Mike purses his lips, bobbing his head, raising one eyebrow as he looks at her. The next words come out clumsy. “So…you gotta boyfriend that’s gonna come pick you up?”
“Oh my god,” Ana says, jumping as if electricity shot up through the cement, shaking her head at herself. She turns on her heel and walks away from him, thinking about bad pick up lines and how nice it would be to have a boyfriend that would come pick her up after work.
--<--@ x @-->--
“You know,” Mike says a few nights later, “I don’t understand why you just don’t let me drive.” He’s walking her home. They have agreed on this. He can walk her home, as long as he stays two feet in front of her where she can see him at all times. She’s thinking on her Econ homework and how much Wednesday’s test is going to blow.
At least Mike’s backside is something that’s not too hard on the eyes. His shoulders are narrow but his ass looks good in the jeans he wears. It’s the third time he’s stayed until close, and the third night he’s left his truck at the store and followed (or rather, led) her home. He talks, she doesn’t, and somewhere between her wandering thoughts on mortgages and the way the denim hugs the curve of his butt, Ana fails to notice when Mike Dirnt stops walking and waits for her to plow right into his shoulder blade.
“Oh shit,” she says, eyes watering as her nose crashes into his back. She puts a hand up to cover her face, sniffling loudly as her face throbs. The crash knocks him forward, sending him a few stumbling steps away from her.
“Jesus, woman,” he says, turning around after he regains footing. “No need to-hey, you okay?” He reaches out and takes her wrist. It’s the first time he’s touched her and his fingers are callused, cold. She thinks wildly about how her momma always said her features were too strong and to not bring so much attention to her nose, and now she’s gone and slammed it, nostrils first, into this skinny boy’s shoulder.
“Yeah, yeah, I…sorry, I didn’t mean to run into you,” she says, mortified as she watches Mike’s blue eyes stare openly at her runny eyes and red nose. She looks at how his hand holds her wrist, delicate and yet capable at the same time.
Mike shrugs, smiles, and drops her hand. “It’s okay. I’ve had worse.” He falls into step beside her, still looking at her profile. Ana takes this as a cue to start moving, blinking through the last of tears. “You sure you’re okay?”
Ana feels like rolling her eyes, but the thought that he’s about to laugh at her makes her both angry and frightened. Instead she just nods, curtly, licking a stray tear away from the corner of her mouth. Mike seems to take the hint and just walks along side her, and Ana doesn’t mention the rule because she is the one that just ran into him with her face. He doesn’t laugh though, he doesn’t say anything, and after awhile the waiting is just too much. “Fine, just…say it,” she says, voice coming out in a tightly controlled rage. “That was pretty stupid, just say it.”
Mike’s blue eyes go wide, his non-eyebrows lifting up into his messy hair. He laughs, which infuriates her to no end. “Well, I guess if you want to look at it that way,” he says. He giggles when he laughs, which is unfortunate, Ana thinks. Boys shouldn’t giggle. It makes her feel a little better.
“I said you could laugh, not be a jerk,” she mumbles, but it’s only half-hearted. She dares to look over at him, and he’s still smiling. It’s not a grin of amusement though, more of warmth.
“You think I’m in a jerk?” he says, still not laughing, just smiling that infuriating smile. She kind of likes it, somewhere in her belly.
“No,” she answers after a moment, lightly, looking away from him. Jerks don’t walk girls home. Creeps do though, and she tries to keep that in mind.
Mike smiles, then lights a cigarette. Ana hates cigarettes, but it looks good inbetween his fingers, like smokes do in the hands of movie stars. “That’s not good for you,” she says. “You should know better.”
“So I’m not a jerk, I’m just stupid?” he asks, looking over at her like a confused child, as if genuinely hurt by her comment. It ruins the cigarette mystique, and she regrets her comment.
“No,” she murmurs again. Mike reaches out, takes her hand. She lets him.
“You’re wrong you know,” he says. “Or you really think I’m a stupid punk stoner. I’m in a band, y’know? It’s pretty frickin’ rad.” He sounds proud.
She rolls her eyes. “Dude, don’t be proud of being a stupid stoner. That’s like, being a proud college drop out.” His hand is sweaty against hers, sort of grimy and sick. She wants to let go, but doesn’t.
“Hey,” he says, giving her an affronted look, smoke billowing out of his nose like an angry bull, “I graduated high school.”
She squeezes his hand, watching her apartment come into sight. He squeezes back, then slides his fingers up her wrist. She shivers. “You’d better go.